'Knockout' star 'can break people in half'

Steven Soderbergh has said that the star of his upcoming spy thriller Knockout "can break people in half".

The Oscar-winning director, who cast mixed martial arts fighter Gina Carano in the lead role, admitted that he wanted to present an accurate take on espionage, more akin to early Bond film From Russia With Love than the recent outing Quantum Of Solace.

He told Empire: "I'd been wanting to make a spy action film for a while, but hadn't really determined what I was going to bring to it that would distinguish it from the traditional approach. Then I thought, 'Why don't I just build it around her? She can actually break people in half'. I was interested in doing something ultra-realistic.

"My desire is for it to be a very realistic portrayal of somebody who gets hired, as these people do, by the government, to go and perform certain duties that it would be inappropriate to give to the military. That could be anything from a hostage-grab to surveillance to an actual killing..."

Speaking about his decision to cast MMA star Carano, who has little acting experience, he said: "My feeling was, If I don't do this, somebody else will. I felt, somebody is going to look at her and go, 'She should be in a movie!' And I felt like, 'Why shouldn't I be the person saying that?'"

Soderbergh's The Informant! opens in the UK on November 20, with The Girlfriend Experience following on December 4.